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Two flavors of PSLab Android App to support Google Maps (in Play Store flavor) and Open Street maps (in Fdroid flavor)

What are the flavors of an App? And why are they needed in PSLab Android App?

While working on the PSLab Android Project, I ran into the need to create different variants of the app with different dependencies. In this blog, I have tried to explain the process of creating various flavors of the app in the easiest way possible.

Android Allows Developers to create different variants of the same app with the same code base but having some functionalities different across the variants. These functionalities may include some special/pro features, some different dependencies, etc. Such variants are called flavors of the App. Most common flavors are Paid and Free version of the app.

In the PSLab Android Application, we needed to generate flavors, when we required to use Google Maps in the App. The app is also published on the Fdroid, which doesn’t allow dependencies of Google Maps. Hence 2 flavors of the app have been created,

Play Store Flavor (With Google Maps)

F-Droid Flavor (With Open Street Maps)

Declaring Flavors in the build.gradle File

In order to create flavors of the app, first, we need to declare flavors in the Gradle file. In PSLab Android app we are creating 2 flavors, which are declared in the build.gradle file as under

flavorDimensions is used to package flavors if there are many flavors for an App. Since we have only two flavors fdroid and playstore, hence we are using single dimension default for both the flavors. Once this has been added to the build.gradle file we need to sync the gradle.

After the Sync is complete, if we open the Build Variants tab from the left corner of the Android Studio, it would look something like this:

(Figure 1: Build Variant Window of Android Studio)

As can be seen in the screenshot above, once the gradle is successfully synced, Android Studio automatically creates debug and release build variants for each flavor and we can easily toggle between variants and build/ run / make apk for each variant. Congratulations! We have successfully finished the first step towards creating flavors of an app.

Directory Structure after creating Flavors

Apart from creating the build variants of different flavors, Android studio also creates src/<flavor name> folders for us. Now if we want to add new activities and classes to these flavors we can create java, res, values folders inside this folder. We can define separate Manifest file as well for each flavor individually. The directory structure of the PSLab Android project after creating required packages inside the automatically generated src/fdroid and src/playstore folders looks like below,

(Figure 2: Directory structure after creating flavors)

Defining Flavor specific dependencies

We can have some dependencies for one app flavor and some for others. For example, in PSLab Android app, we need Google Maps dependencies only in playstore flavor and Open Street Maps dependencies only in fdroid flavor. We can easily define flavor specific dependencies by adding flavor name before Implementation command in gradle file. Like below,

Same Activity/Class with different Flavor

Now the main purpose of creating flavors is to have some different functionalities between the flavors. For that we need the base app to call different class/activity from the src/<flavor name> folder depending on the selected flavor. We will discuss this in reference to PSLab Android app.

So, for PSLab android app we want app to open Google Maps in Play Store flavor and Open Street Maps in froid flavor. For this we need to create a duplicate Activity. Which means we will have two separate implementation of same Activity MapsActivity.java , one in the F-Droid source folder and one in playstore source folder. So MapsActivity.java will only be declared once in the src/main/AndroidManifest.xml file, but there will be two different classes for this activity in each flavor folder. Now when the main app will call MapsActivity.class from any intent depending on the selected build variant either playstore version of MapsActivity will be launched or the F-Droid version. So after creating two instances of the MapsActivity.java the directory structure would look something like given in the screenshot below,

(Figure 3: Directory structure after creating MapsActivity)

As can be seen in the directory structure, now both Play Store and F-Droid folders have their own instances of MapsActivity.java , and now we can easily implement code for Open Street Maps and Google Maps in the respective MapsActivity.java and we have two versions of the app working flawlessly.